Sex and the Other – On the Mystery of Sex and the “Sexiness” of Mystery as a Political Factor
This article, which is an introduction to the translation of the chapter from Alenka Zupančič’s book “What IS Sex?” has two main goals: one, to present the core of the bold argument advanced by the author as to the close connection between sex, politics and ontology, and secondly, to position the complex theoretical process in a larger context of associations between philosophy and psychoanalysis, especially as they are expressed in the author’s philosophical oeuvre and that of the school of thought to which she belongs, the Ljubljana school.
The book “What IS Sex” goes back to the concrete site where the scandalous and fateful encounter occurred between psychoanalysis and philosophy – the question of the nature of sex. The theoretical course of the book is a two-way process. On the one hand, the author seeks to trace the effect of the question of essence, the question of what is X, concerning her object, sex. That is, she argues, the philosophical core of psychoanalysis. At the basis of psychoanalysis is an ontological question about a particularly intractable object, an object that refuses to stand as a being in the order of beings. This gives rise to the second, contrary and complementary direction of inquiry, which traces the consequences of that special ontological status for ontology in general – the contribution if you will of the psychoanalytical discovery to philosophy. But this apparently abstract discussion about ontology and sex has very tangible consequences for the political field.
As opposed to a dominant stream of critical thought, that wishes to resist explanations from the biological field by exposing cultural constructions, a stream that achieved great success in the sexual field with the de facto replacement of the category sex with the category gender, Zupančič seeks to locate the discontent of human sex within nature itself. The intractability of sex reveals something that is already intractable in nature itself, which prevents nature from “defining itself.” This analysis allows Zupančič to expose a structural aspect of the paradox of human liberation, that maintains a close association with the way we understand the relationship between nature and culture.
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